Dirtbag
by MiaGhost
Summary: Gabriel is a teenage dirtbag, but at least it seems like Sam doesn't care.
1. Chapter 1

~.~

Sam Winchester is the kid brother of the most popular guy in school.

Dean is the track-team star, ladies' man and owner of the sweetest black car Gabriel's ever seen. He plays guitar, has a voice to melt the knees of even the most fervent music-hater and won't stand for bullying. He's every guy's ideal best friend, every girl's dream guy and every teacher's favourite student.

Gabriel Novak is, for all intents and purposes, a nobody. Less than a nobody. He's the moody kid who hangs out near the smokers, reading stuff he shouldn't and listening to music too loud and too profane to be appropriate for school.

Dean's that leading role in every teen romance ever. He's the jock with an actual personality underneath. He's the popular kid who still gives the shy girl a smile when he passes her in the hallway and roars at the bad kids who try to bully his little brother.

Gabriel's the kid that Wheatus sang about. And he's determined to get his Noelle, who in this case happens to be nearly six foot tall and all over gorgeous, with hazel green eyes and floppy brown hair that just perpetuates the kicked-puppy look the kid always wears.

There's two years between them, and although Gabriel knows two years means nothing in life, at High School it's everything. He knows what people would say about him, seventeen and pining after a kid who's not even legal yet. But Gabriel's long over that. He's been over it for years. He's tried everything to get over him, he's tried it _all_.

And the worst part is that they don't even really know each other. They don't talk, they don't hang in the same circles, and they don't share any of the same activities. But a weak part of Gabriel knows that if he were to indulge he'd try any of the things Sam likes, just as an excuse to get to know him. It's why he sulks around the library after school sometimes, reading slightly racy books from the senior section and claiming they're for his Lit class when the librarian gives him suspicious looks. He sits by himself with one earphone in and his feet on the table in front of him and he watches Sam Winchester come out of his shell.

It's the only place the kid ever really smiles.

Gabriel watches, during study sessions and after-school reading clubs, doing his best not to smile as he watches Sam really let go, really show his enthusiasm. He watches the animated way the kid talks with his hands, something Gabriel does too and something that makes his chest warm because he's always been a little self-conscious about it and it's sort've nice to see someone else does it too. He listens to the pleasant sound of Sam's voice, to the threads of excitement and passion when he's right in the very middle of explaining why the book they're reading is worth his love.

Gabriel likes everything Sam does, everything he says, even when he doesn't really understand it or agree with him. He likes to hear Sam laugh, secluded in the library with his group of friends and he likes the moments when they are quiet, when they read passages to themselves, or better yet when Sam reads his favourite parts out loud. Gabriel's in deep, and he knows it.

And his favourite moments are those fleeting, tiny ones, when Sam's eyes drift across the room when he's thinking, or when he's listening to someone talk, and his eyes will meet Gabriel's for just a heartbeat. Those are Gabriel's favourite moments for many, many reasons.

The electricity that tingles along his skin at the contact, the way his stomach quivers, the trip of his heart.

But the best reason is that Sam always smiles.

Nothing beaming and overt and sparkling, but something small, just this side of polite and a little friendly.

Because Gabriel has a terrible reputation, a really _really_ bad one, one that might rival even his big brother Lucifer's. He's proud of it, of the way it makes people avoid him, of the way it makes bullies think twice about going near his little brother Castiel. Most of it is exaggeration, lies, gossip. A lot of it is true.

But in those tiny, fleeting heartbeats, Sam doesn't look like he cares, giving Gabriel that small, friendly smile with eyes that hold no fear of him.

And it might just be those tiny moments that ensure Gabriel can't get over him.

~.~


	2. Chapter 2

~.~

Gabriel Novak is the older brother of the quietest kid in school.

Castiel Novak is a two years younger than Sam, so extraordinarily clever with Literature that he's in Sam's Advanced Lit class. He's deep-eyed and solemn, not known to participate vocally in group work and never known to make eye contact with anyone but Sam on the rare occasions he has no choice but to speak. His mind is a thing of enchanting beauty, and although he was only placed beside Sam because Sam had the only empty desk next to him, Sam has never had a closer friend, unless you count his own older brother.

If people were novels, Castiel would be a lengthy tome of flourishing phrases and deep, detailed imagery, scored in a great tale of heroism and inspired thought.

Their friendship is sedate yet rock-steady, a mutual, unspoken exploration into an unshakable foundation. Castiel isn't ready to be involved in the intense social atmosphere of Sam's favourite after-school club, and Sam understands.

They eat lunch in the English study rooms twice a week, and once in the Music rooms. Castiel politely declines invitations to join Sam's family for dinner, and doesn't extend his own. Sam understands. He's hopeful it'll happen some day, but for now he allows Castiel his own pace. He'll grow confident in his own time.

If people were novels, Sam hopes he'd be something as interesting as his best friend, but maybe with more action, or mystical creatures, or maybe mild thrills. Something daring, or fast-paced. Something clever.

His brother is for sure something full of travelling against the grain, of growing up fast and proving himself on every page. He's full of exciting chases and heart-in-your-mouth moments of fire, with notes here and there of a heart shrouded in chain-link fencing to fool the forces of evil he faces.

Their father is one of those thin-spined paperbacks you see lurking in the thriller shelves of the library, unsure whether to be a horror or a psychological thriller, lacking the muted optimism and brief instances of progress you'd expect from either, but with the worst of both. He's written in damp, blunt sentences with little deviation into anything beyond focus, a cold and single-minded tiring tale of woe and danger of all the worst kinds.

From what Dean has told him of their mother, in those out-grown secret conversation of their childhood, she was a tale of great passion and magic, a collection of musical sonnets, a fairytale of sacred loves and unbroken will. Sam wishes desperately that he'd had the chance to know her tale first-hand, to hear her story and know her verses the way their father had. The way Dean had for those brief four years. Her death, so sudden and unexpected and so tragically brutal, had left her story forever stalled in the second act.

Sam closes his eyes and fights the way his smile shifts on his face, threatening to fall. Sometimes he wishes he didn't overthink so much. He hears the turning of pages from across the room, even over the voices of his friends, their laughter or their responses.

When he opens his eyes again he snorts, forcing his focus on the point at hand. He thinks Jake's opinion sounds good on paper, but he himself sees a depth to the antagonist that the others are clearly missing.

He begins quiet enough, his point intended as short, sweet. But then he's thinking of someone else and his face is itching with the urge to glance across the room. He elaborates, embellishes, turns left at a junction on a tangent he didn't mean to, but his group are enthralled.

He speaks at length of hidden treasures, of armour so thick and so dented and so dinged that it is perceived as impenetrable. He murmurs of protagonists who cease their attempts, of communities and heroes who stop asking, and stop questioning, and stop trying, who set aside their belief that good exists in everyone and who begin to believe in the tales and the legends and the myths and the warnings.

By the end, he's talked himself so deeply into his own heart that he can't help looking over as he finishes, at the boy across the room whose scuffed and faded boots are crossed atop a clean desk, whose laces trail despondently and whose fingers support half-heartedly a paperback Sam knows the librarian wishes didn't exist.

Sam isn't listening to how his group respond to his over-enthusiastic ramble, because his mind is too preoccupied revisiting a well-worn trail of thought.

If people were novels, Gabriel Novak would be one of those whose spine holds no clues but for his name, a text full of intrigue and fog and that tight curl of trepidation in your stomach. Gabriel Novak is a mystery Sam so wants to crack, a case unsolved, an enigma untranslated. Gabriel Novak is written in a tongue Sam has never come across before and yet unlike everyone else they seem to know, Sam is driven to learn its nuances.

Gabriel Novak exists in that uncharted grey territory between thriller and mystery, a cursed-castle, missing-person, ghostly adventure scrawled in secretive, twisting passages which tempt with possibility but no-one dares tread for fear of what may lurk around their shadowed corners. He is isolated as a darkened castle on a steep and rocky incline, battlements guarded by indecipherable silhouettes and shrouded in the faint, mournful cries of what might be mountain wolves or the dying souls of the damned.

He is an expanse of rolling sea, tipped with waving crests that reflect the sun but are feared to hide the predators of the deep. His outside speaks of hidden traps and unexpected quicksand and the unattainable suspicion that there are things nearby that bite and yet Sam can see within his eyes the tangible truth that there is a language out there that Gabriel is written in, an answer to his riddle, a candle flickering in that distant window of that vampiric castle which draws him up the rocky, treacherous trail.

Nobody dares creep too far. He rests atop his hill unsolved. The locals retreat to the safety of their mapped lands and trade whispers over the bartops, huddling in the safe glow of the fire.

Gabriel Novak is a rhythmic ballad of the unknown and the unpredictable, with eyes of a colour that Sam can never decide upon, amber and hazel yet golden and fierce even while they're tracking the words upon the pages of whichever book he's chosen that day. Sam's watched him choose a bolder text each time, sure he was daring someone to say something. Sam thinks he's heard a song that embodies the strange older boy.

The first time Sam caught sight of him here, in his favoured part of their school, his heart had fumbled just a fraction, for Sam had never dreamed he'd share this savoured room with _him_.

Sam has known for a long time that he's fallen more than just a little for Castiel's big brother, the concept almost laughable when he considers how Castiel idolises Sam's own brother. If it were a book it'd be a YA novel, and Sam would laugh at his own tragic heart, and still read it.

Gabriel is puzzling and confusing and makes Sam feel a little wary and yet Sam's seen between the stones of the vast wall around the castle, has seen the way the clouds shrink back when Gabriel smiles. He's keen to search out the chinks in that armour, knows they exist because he has to, because he believes.

Sam Winchester loves a puzzle.

~.~


End file.
